Joseph Philippe Poelaert

Belgian architect, influenced by Schinkel and Visconti, who became Brussels City Architect in 1856. He designed the Colonne du Congrès (1850–9) and other buildings in Brussels, but his greatest work was the Sublime Beaux-Arts Baroque Palais de Justice (1866–83), a vast pile of pyramidal composition crowned by a massive dome, influenced perhaps by Brodrick's Town Hall, Leeds (1852–8), and by the visionary paintings of John Martin (1789–1854). Some of the internal public spaces have an Antique Roman grandeur worthy of Piranesi. He also designed the Neo-Gothic Notre-Dame de Laeken, Brussels (1851–65), completed (1865–1907) by von Schmidt of Munich and others.

Bibliography

• Hitchcock (1977)
• Loo (ed.) (2003)
• Placzek (ed.) (1982)
• Jane Turner (1996)
• D.Watkin (1986)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)